Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You on the Path to Destruction? | New Testament | Matthew 19

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Where has God put you in your life? What takes real courage in your life? How are you at managing your responsibilities? Can you find contentment where you are? In today's episode, Patrick shares the difference between the path to life and the path to destruction as told by Matthew 19. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in 2023. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Matthew 19

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. How do you think about the roles and responsibilities that characterize your life? Maybe they're social roles. Employee, employer, student, teacher, coach, athlete, chef, restaurant, patron, pastor, or church member, or maybe their family roles, son, daughter, brother, sister, father, mother, husband, or wife. Whoever you are, you are a role player somewhere.

And with that role comes unique responsibilities and even rules and expectations. When you're in that role, you're expected to act a certain way and to do certain things. If you cuss at someone on the street, it wouldn't be very nice. But if he cuss at a ref during a game, you'll get thrown out. If a parent tells a child to brush their teeth, it's hardly worth noticing. But if an employee tells an employer to brush his teeth, well, things might get interesting. If you stop and think about it, you'll realize that you spend most of your life playing a mirror. of roles. And for many in our culture, this is a profound problem. Because when you play a role,

you aren't being authentic. You aren't being true to yourself. When you play a role, you aren't expressing your true, deep down feelings. Perhaps the oldest roles in human history are those of husband and wife, and then, of course, son and daughter and all the other family roles that come along with it. These are pre-political roles because you need families before you can ever have societies and you can't have families without procreation and people raising children together. But marriage is no different than the other roles have described. I recently heard someone described someone else as brave for getting a divorce. And when I heard that, I assumed that the person they were talking about had experienced something traumatic in their marriage, physical

abuse, verbal abuse, or adultery, some of the common and biblical reasons for divorce. But I came to find out that this wasn't the case. She got a divorce because she just wasn't as happy as she thought she should be. There wasn't enough laughter. The bedroom was cold. They occasionally disagreed about politics, but at the end of the day, she was just bored and unhappy, and so she left. Do you think that's an act of courage? I ask because courage is a strange way of framing it. What precisely is courageous about doing what you want, serving your own interests, putting yourself first? Wouldn't it have been more courageous to go to counseling, to work through their issues together, to seek a new life inside of their relationship? Well, if you want to know why someone might think of that

as being courageous, here's the answer. We believe that self-expression and authenticity are the highest, most noble values in human existence. If you're being authentic to yourself, then you're courageous because you're being noble, letting your role in responsibilities define you, cage you and hem you in. Well, that's cowardice. It's weakness. It's subservient. Interestingly, the Pharisees in Jesus' day would have agreed with our culture when it came to marriage. Matthew 193 says this. Some Pharisees came to him to test him.

They asked him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? Now, their answer to this question is, as we'll find out, yes, you should be able to do that. Do you hear the self-expression there? You should be able to divorce someone for any and every reason. the role of husband isn't defining. The responsibilities of a husband aren't binding. He should just be free to express himself. Well, Jesus responds in verse four.

Haven't you read? He replied that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female and said, For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and become united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they're no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God is joined together, let no one separate. Do you hear Jesus's response? Marriage is binding because God's the one who does it.

God's the one who puts you in that role. God's the one who's given you those responsibilities. A husband and a wife do not simply inhabit roles and responsibilities. Those roles and responsibilities by divine work become a part of their being in some true fashion. Roles and responsibilities aren't cages, they're trellises. They're the trellises on which vines and fruit comes. grow. God designed us this way to inhabit roles and responsibilities and to find life there through them. But the Pharisees, they don't buy it. Verse seven, why then? They asked. Did Moses

command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? Jesus replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not like this from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman commits adultery. The disciples said to him, if this is the situation between a husband and a wife, it's better not to marry. Even the disciples are flabbergasted.

You see self-expression, being authentic, all of that, it's just innate. It's almost obvious to us. So if you feel put off by what Jesus is saying here, you're not alone. But we have to remember, Jesus understands how you were designed. He understands how all humans were designed,

far better than you and me. Jesus knows the path of life. Jesus understands you and wants what's best for you. So his words here are hard to hear. It means that they're words you need to hear. Keith, one of our co-hosts here, he likes to use this illustration. Imagine you went to a car mechanic to have him check out your car. And he gets back with you and says, hey, nothing's wrong with it. This car is in great shape. But a week later, you get into an accident because your brakes stopped working. It turns out that you are out of brake fluid. So you go back to the mechanic and you say, why didn't you tell me about the break fluid? How would you feel if he said, well, I didn't want to hurt your feelings. So I didn't want to say anything about your car. Jesus is less worried about your feelings than he is about the car accident that will happen if he stays silent. In this passage, he issues a challenge to our cultural

moment that we all need to hear, whether we're single, married, or divorced. Being true to yourself and authentic to your feelings is not the highest virtue. Putting your happiness about the happiness of others is not an act of courage. Rejecting and neglecting the roles and responsibilities that God's given you in your life is not the most noble. It's not the path to happiness. It's the path to self-destruction. God has put you in a time, in a place with a people.

It's not an accident. You have roles to play. They matter to him. They should matter to you. He's calling you to die to yourself by serving others in those roles that he's given you. He's calling you to die yourself by taking up those responsibilities that he's given you. So where do you get the strength to do that? By remembering that Jesus did it for you.

See, he embraced the role of the Son of God obeying his father. He embraced the role of the good king who lays down his life for his people. He owned the terrible responsibilities that come with those roles. In the Garden of Gassimony, he doesn't say, Heavenly Father, give me strength to be true to my feelings and do what I want, that would have been cowardice. Instead, he asks for courage to do his father's will. Don't buy into the lies of authenticity and self-expression. Embrace your responsibilities as a gift to be stewarded. Die to yourself. Love others. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show

notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.